Collected Works of Nicholas Kaldor
There are 9 volumes of collected works of Nicholas Kaldor: volumes 1 and 2 both have first and second editions. There is a PDF of the contents pages of these collected works here.

Kaldor, Ν. 1980. “Public or Private Enterprise: The Issues to be Considered,” in W. J. Baumol (ed.), Public and Private Enterprise in a Mixed Economy: Proceedings of a Conference Held by the International Economic Association in Mexico City, Macmillan, London. 1–14.

Kaldor, Nicholas. 1980. “The Foundations of Free Trade Theory and their Implications for the Current World Recession,” in E. Malinvaud and J. P. Fitoussi (eds.), Unemployment in Western Countries. MacMillan Press, London. 85–100.

Wednesday, April 12, 2017

A viral video of an army of robots sorting packages in a Chinese delivery warehouse (more here):

And here:

The notion we need unending Third World mass immigration because of supposed labour shortages in the future has to be the single biggest absurdity pushed by advocates of multiculturalism and Neoliberals.

Instead, we are going to import millions of immigrants only to find there is no work for them, not to mention the millions of native-born citizens.

And then there is the terrible issue: what do you do with the low-skilled people who have been replaced by machines and automation? The notion that all or most people can be easily retrained to be IT professionals, middle class professionals or workers capable of doing highly-skilled labour is a cruel lie. Most people who have spent their lives doing low-skilled or semi-skilled labour obviously did so because they were not capable of doing something better. Their educational ability is likely to be limited.

Under Neoliberalism and in Neoclassical economics, there is a clear tendency to see human beings as fungible and homogeneous. This is an outrageous lie. The average person who is an unskilled or low-skilled labourer cannot magically become a surgeon or computer programmer, no matter how much money or education you throw at them. This is going to be yet another serious problem for the 21st century.

Sunday, April 9, 2017

The veteran ex-CIA officer Ray McGovern, of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and who chaired the US National Intelligence Estimates and prepared the President’s Daily Brief in the 1980s, citing actual well-placed sources in the US government, gives us what sounds to me like the truth about this chemical attack in Syria:

This confirms the same intelligence reported to Philip Giraldi by intelligence and military personnel on the ground in the Middle East as discussed here.

So there seems to be mounting evidence that the Russian and Syrian governments’ explanation of what happened on 4 April 2017 in Khan Shaykhun in the Idlib province was the truth: the Syrian government carried out a conventional attack on the Islamist rebels and hit a chemical storage warehouse, which caused these fatalities. We don’t know precisely what chemicals were involved without an independent investigation, but it is unlikely that will happen.

And yet our media is filled with these unconfirmed hysterical cries that Assad gassed his own people. And there are calls left, right and centre from the usual suspects for a massive new war against Syria.

In essence, even though there aren’t any big-name Neocons in high-level positions in the Trump administration, it is the National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster who is supporting a return to Neoconservative-style policies in Syria:

“Just two days after news broke of an alleged poison-gas attack in northern Syria, President Trump brushed aside advice from some U.S. intelligence analysts doubting the Syrian regime’s guilt and launched a lethal retaliatory missile strike against a Syrian airfield.

Trump immediately won plaudits from Official Washington, especially from neoconservatives who have been trying to wrestle control of his foreign policy away from his nationalist and personal advisers since the days after his surprise victory on Nov. 8.

There is also an internal dispute over the intelligence. On Thursday night, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the U.S. intelligence community assessed with a “high degree of confidence” that the Syrian government had dropped a poison gas bomb on civilians in Idlib province.

But a number of intelligence sources have made contradictory assessments, saying the preponderance of evidence suggests that Al Qaeda-affiliated rebels were at fault, either by orchestrating an intentional release of a chemical agent as a provocation or by possessing containers of poison gas that ruptured during a conventional bombing raid.

One intelligence source told me that the most likely scenario was a staged event by the rebels intended to force Trump to reverse a policy, announced only days earlier, that the U.S. government would no longer seek “regime change” in Syria and would focus on attacking the common enemy, Islamic terror groups that represent the core of the rebel forces.

The source said the Trump national security team split between the President’s close personal advisers, such as nationalist firebrand Steve Bannon and son-in-law Jared Kushner, on one side and old-line neocons who have regrouped under National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, an Army general who was a protégé of neocon favorite Gen. David Petraeus. ….

Though Bannon and Kushner are often presented as rivals, the source said, they shared the belief that Trump should tell the truth about Syria, revealing the Obama administration’s CIA analysis that a fatal sarin gas attack in 2013 was a “false-flag” operation intended to sucker President Obama into fully joining the Syrian war on the side of the rebels — and the intelligence analysts’ similar beliefs about Tuesday’s incident.

Instead, Trump went along with the idea of embracing the initial rush to judgment blaming Assad for the Idlib poison-gas event. The source added that Trump saw Thursday night’s missile assault as a way to change the conversation in Washington, where his administration has been under fierce attack from Democrats claiming that his election resulted from a Russian covert operation.

Philip Giraldi in the first link reports that intelligence and military personnel he has contact with report that the Russians’ explanation of the chemical attack is true: that a Syrian military attack using conventional bombs on the rebels in Idlib hit a chemical or chemical weapons storage facility that *belonged to the Islamist rebels themselves*. If true, this was all a tragic accident in wartime.

Turning to Trump’s attack on the Syrian Shayrat airbase, unless we see a major escalation of US efforts to remove Assad from now on, this military strike seems more symbolic than anything else. Could it be that the Trump administration did this in desperation to quash the hysterical media lies that Russia hacked the election and that Trump is Putin’s puppet?

But, if Trump does move to ramp up the previous schizophrenic policy of both trying defeat ISIS in Syria and overthrowing the Assad regime, it will result in an utter catastrophe for Syria. It will be a major betrayal of his campaign promises and a Neocon-style foreign policy – a policy which he promised to repudiate last year.

The only real beneficiaries will be the increasingly authoritarian Islamist regime in Turkey, the fundamentalist Arab gulf states like Saudi Arabia, and Israel, who all want Assad gone for their own reasons.

Millions more migrants will swamp Europe. The only credible “opposition” in Syria are Islamist lunatics, who might gain power and then cause a bloodbath in that country.

And as for the media narrative and the line taken by the Trump administration and other Western governments that the Assad regime was responsible for a chemical weapons attack in Idlib province, we should all revisit Seymour Hersh’s brilliant investigative journalism from 2013–2014 on the Ghouta chemical attack of 21 August 2013, and the subsequent facts that came to light:

There is much evidence that the sarin attack at Ghouta in 2013 was perpetuated by the Islamist rebels, but orchestrated by Turkish intelligence in order to draw America into a major war in Syria to overthrow Assad.

So – at the very least – what is needed now is an independent investigation of what happened and who did it, not some hysterical drumbeat for war fuelled by the media, and where the truth is clouded by propaganda from all sides.

As Peter Hitchens says here, this war hysteria and the demands for regime change over WMD are like 2003 all over again.

Wednesday, April 5, 2017

On economics, Henry Sidgwick was a something of a hybrid figure: he was not quite an orthodox neoclassical, but at the same time he had moved on from Classical Political Economy too. In politics, he was not quite a conservative, but not an orthodox Classical Liberal either.

At any rate, in his book The Elements of Politics (2nd rev. edn., 1897), we have this discussion of immigration:

“The question of free immigration has occupied a much smaller place in modern political discussion than the question of free trade: still, freedom of immigration is a recognised feature of the ideal which orthodox political economists have commonly formed of international relations. And it seems to be often implicitly assumed in the economic arguments for free trade; since, as I have pointed out, in order that the advantages of complete freedom of exchange among nations may be fully realised, it is necessary that labour should move with perfect ease from country to country to meet the changes that are continually likely to occur in the industrial demand for it. On the other hand, we have seen that the system of international rights, framed in the earlier period of modern European history on the principle of mutual non-interference, allows each State , complete freedom in determining the positive relations into which it will enter with States and individuals outside it; and though theoretically I cannot concede to a State possessing large tracts of unoccupied land an absolute right of excluding alien elements, I have not proposed any limitation of this right in the case of civilised countries generally. The truth is, that when we consider how far the exercise of this right of exclusion is conducive to the real interest of the State exercising it, or of humanity at large, we come upon the most striking phase of the general conflict between the cosmopolitan and the national ideals of political organisation, which has more than once attracted our notice. According to the national ideal, the right and duty of each government is to promote the interests of a determinate group of human beings, bound together by the tie of a common nationality with due regard to the rules restraining it from attacking or encroaching on other States and to consider the expediency of admitting foreigners and their products solely from this point of view. According to the cosmopolitan ideal, its business is to maintain order over the particular territory that historical causes have appropriated to it, but not in any way to determine who is to inhabit this territory, or to restrict the enjoyment of its natural advantages to any particular portion of the human race.

The latter is perhaps the ideal of the future; but it allows too little for the national and patriotic sentiments which have in any case to be reckoned with as an actually powerful political force, and which appear to be at present indispensable to social wellbeing. We cannot yet hope to substitute for these sentiments, in sufficient diffusion and intensity, the wider sentiment connected with the conception of our common humanity; so that the casual aggregates that might result from perfectly unrestrained immigration would lack internal cohesion. Again, the governmental function of promoting moral and intellectual culture might be rendered hopelessly difficult by the continual inflowing streams of alien immigrants, with diverse moral habits and religious traditions. Similarly, the efficient working of the political institutions of different States presupposes certain characteristics in the human beings to whom they are applied; and a large intermixture of immigrants brought up under different institutions might inevitably introduce corruption and disorder into a previously well-ordered State.

I think, therefore, that it would not be really in the interest of humanity at large, to impose upon civilised States generally, as an absolute international duty, the free admission of immigrants; and that it would be a proper policy for any such State to place restrictions on immigration, if ever it should threaten to take such dimensions as to interfere materially with the internal cohesion of a nation, or with the efforts of its government to maintain an adequately high quality of civilised life among the members of the community generally.” (Sidgwick 1897: 307–309).

This is a very important passage, for the following reasons:

(1) Sidgwick puts his finger on the fact that free movement of people is a natural corollary of free trade under laissez faire capitalism;

(2) Sidgwick also notes that the “cosmopolitan ideal” of the free market ideologues severely conflicts with the more interventionist and protectionist “national ideals of political organisation”;

(3) Sidgwick himself sympathises with the “cosmopolitan ideal,” but has the intelligence to recognise it is too utopian and unrealistic for the developed Western world, and he concedes that open borders would not work, given the “national and patriotic sentiments” amongst human beings; he also notes that free immigration would destroy the “internal cohesion of a nation” and present a dangerous threat to the “high quality of civilised life.”

Sidgwick was right on these points.

Notably, Sidgwick did not even appeal to – nor even mention – the type of biological theories of racial differences that were held by virtually every intellectual by the late 19th century: Sidgwick’s argument against open borders is a pragmatic one based on economic, political, social and cultural factors.

And yet for all this Sidgwick still shows how wedded he was to the utopian fantasies of the cosmopolitans in a passage that immediately follows his discussion above:

“Apart from these mischievous consequences, the free admission of aliens will generally be advantageous to the country admitting them; partly for reasons similar to those that render free trade generally expedient, as the recipient State is thus enabled to share the advantage of the special faculties and empirical arts in which other countries excel; partly as tending to the diffusion of mutual knowledge and sympathy among nations. Further, as I shall presently point out, over a large part of the earth’s surface the union of diverse races under a common government seems to be an almost indispensable condition of economic progress and the spread of civilisation; in spite of the political and social difficulties and draw backs that this combination entails.” (Sidgwick 1897: 309).

Despite his good sense earlier, here Sidgwick was wrong.

Multiculturalism hasn’t really worked in the Third World either, and we need only think of the history of South Africa, the resentment that native Africans have against white European elites in Africa today, the massive genocidal violence during the partition of India, the Israel–Palestine conflict, the break-up of Yugoslavia, the civil war in Lebanon, the inter-ethnic conflicts within the Soviet Union which helped to cause the collapse of that state, and a myriad of other conflicts caused by sectarian ethnic and religious differences.

In the end, it is the cosmopolitan, open borders fanatics – who think that open borders would bring about some kind of utopia on earth – who have been proven wrong.

The people who were right all along were the realists and economic nationalists, who recognise that strict immigration control is necessary for preserving the standard of living in a developed nation, and that open borders are incompatible with what Sidgwick called the “national and patriotic sentiments” amongst human beings.

This is a pragmatic, rational, humane and morally correct view – and it does not require us to be racists or “haters” or “xenophobes,” or any of the filthy slanders usually invoked by the vicious Cultural Left and multiculturalists.

Saturday, April 1, 2017

Keynes views on population growth and immigration can be easily found from a reading of John Toye’s book Keynes on Population (Oxford, 2000; reviews of the book include Dimand 2003 and Harcourt 2002).

The purpose of this post is not to evaluate whether Keynes was right on every detail, but to just state what he thought on this subject in the years before the First World War.

On 2 May 1914, Keynes gave a paper called “Is the Problem of Population a Pressing and Important one Now?” at New College, Oxford, at a meeting of the Political Philosophy and Science Club (Toye 2000: 44–45; Toye 1997: 2). That paper is an interesting record of his early views on population and immigration.

The text of Keynes’ short unpublished draft manuscript from 1914 that was the basis for his paper on population can be found in Toye (2000: 53–72).

In essence, Keynes noted that high birth rates existed in much of the Third World and so very serious overpopulation too, e.g., in India and China (Toye 2000: 62–63, 65). He noted that birth rates in the West had shown a tendency to decrease from the late 19th century (Toye 2000: 62, 67).

Keynes also thought that overpopulation in the Third World inhibited economic development there, and that many such nations had not yet escaped from the Malthusian curse of overpopulation and the limitations of food supply (Toye 2000: 61–63). But Keynes thought that, at some point, both the Third World and the West must face limits to the productivity of agriculture and increased food production in the face of population growth, even if there had been a remarkable increase in the latter in the 19th century that had overcome Malthus’ predictions (Toye 2000: 65).

Keynes therefore favoured birth control to limit population growth to avoid shortages of food and to assist economic development and more rapid improvement in the standard of living (Toye 2000: 70–71).

Keynes thought that the West should eventually achieve a population “equilibrium” (Toye 2000: 70, 71), or what would now be called a fertility rate at replacement level to maintain the population. (On this, we now know Keynes’ musings in 1914 were wrong, since fertility rates in most Western nations have fallen below the replacement rate of 2.1. However, by 1937, Keynes had realised that low birth rates in the West might eventually cause a falling population.)

So what did Keynes think about the kind of immigration policy that Western nations should adopt?

Keynes understood that differential birth rates had emerged between the West and the non-Western world (Toye 2000: 66, 71).

At the end of his lecture notes, Keynes pointed out that mass Third World immigration into the West would be a threat to the standard of living in the Western world:

“Almost any measures seem to me to be justified in order to protect our Standard of life from injury at the hands of more prolific races. Some definite parcelling out of the world may well become necessary; … Countries in the position of British Columbia are entirely justified in protecting themselves from the fecundity of the East by very rigorous Immigration laws and other restrictive measures. I can imagine a time when it may be the right policy even to regulate the international trade in food supplies, though there are economic reasons, which I cannot go into now, for thinking this improbable.” (Toye 2000: 71).

In modern language, we would say that such large-scale mass Third World immigration would tend to lower per capita GDP, lower real wages and decrease living standards through overpopulation.

Keynes also thought that, as the West reached a replacement fertility rate, immigration restriction would be needed to stop mass immigration of people with higher birth rates from the non-Western world:

“If custom and practice [sc. regarding use of contraception in the West] are encouraged to develop along their present lines, it is just possible that western nations may reach of their own accord a position of more or less of equilibrium. They may protect themselves from the fecundity of the East by very rigorous immigration laws and other restrictive measures. And eventually they may be in a position to mould law and custom deliberately to bring about that density of population which there ought to be.” (Toye 2000: 69–70).

So we know what Keynes’ opinions were, at least at this stage of his life.

To put it bluntly, (1) Keynes was clearly not in favour of the demographic replacement of Europeans with people from the Third World, given differential birth rates and mass immigration into the West, and (2) he thought that population control worldwide and immigration restriction in the West would be necessary for economic reasons to increase and maintain living standards and quality of life.

What would Keynes think of Britain in 2017, where the effects of open borders and mass immigration are undoubtedly lowering the quality of life, and native British people are well on their way to being a minority in their own country by the late 21st century?

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dimand, Robert W. 2003. Review of Keynes on Population by John Toye, History of Political Economy 35.4: 784–785.

Harcourt, G. C. 2002. Review of Keynes on Population by John Toye, The Economic Journal 112.480: F391–F394.